Days Like Smoke
by jotunblood
Summary: There was an empty grave in Brooklyn's Cypress Hills Cemetery. The stone was cheap and chalky, incised in black with Bucky's name and military rank. Steve told him so one morning over breakfast.


_Cross-posted from my ao3 account! This story became weirdly important to me during the writing process, so I hope y'all enjoy it as much as I have! A few surface changes have been made (mostly word choice) from the original post, but otherwise the same! Just a little updated from the first posting this passed summer._

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><p>There was an empty grave in Brooklyn's Cypress Hills Cemetery. The stone was cheap and chalky, incised in black with Bucky's name and military rank. Steve told him so one morning over breakfast. Or rather, he explained after Bucky asked about it directly. A woman in Barnes' group therapy claimed to have seen it, and he'd chewed over the idea for a week before bringing it up.<p>

"You were dead, as far as anyone knew," Steve said. "It didn't feel right to not have a grave."

Bucky inspected a spoonful of yogurt. It was the creamy white of toothpaste- he didn't care for the brands with food coloring- and tangy. He didn't remember yogurt being tangy before. Then again, there wasn't much he remembered from before.

He slipped the spoon between his lips and licked it clean. "What's in it?"

"A coffin, I'd wager." Bucky cocked a brow, and the Steve held up his hands in surrender. "I really don't know, Buck. I was out of town, remember?"

"But you authorized the burial."

Steve shrugged. "Wasn't hard. I just had to mail a few forms. The funerary service took it from there."

"Right."

Except it wasn't right. Steve was Captain America; thousands would've mourned his death. A show grave for Steve would make sense- for all Bucky knew, there was one- but for Sgt. Barnes?

Bucky scraped the sides of the yogurt cup clean, trying to imagine his siblings laying flowers at a headstone. His memories of them were fuzzy, but what he'd been left with made the scene almost impossible to conjure up. They wouldn't have gone to a monument; they wouldn't have liked it. There was a poem for that sort of thing; his sister had copied it into a letter during the war. Bucky could almost taste it on his tongue, could almost-

_Do not stand… do not… _

Well, it didn't matter. The point was, no one would've flocked to his grave; not his siblings, and not any of his old friends. Steve would've gone, but to waste an entire cemetery plot for one grieving man?

Across the table, Steve was stirring his Cheerios. His golden hands were too big for the spoon. The only evidence of it were small metallic clinks as it brushed the sides of the bowl. It was symbolic of something, Bucky thought. Maybe of himself. He felt strangely small, these days. Too small for this new Steve.

"How did you pay for it?"

Steve shrugged again. Had the Captain always done that? It seemed like too passive a gesture for someone so scrappy. "The funeral service gave me a discount. Your last pay nearly covered it, and I threw in the difference."

"Could I see it?"

The spoon slipped out of Steve's hand, clattering against the lip of his bowl. The Captain's eyes were wide with surprise.

"You sure, Buck?" Steve asked, picking up the spoon. His grip was white knuckled around its neck. Bucky wondered if asking had been a mistake. "It's not impressive."

It was a feeble cover, even for the Captain. They had been poor in those days, and Bucky knew it. It was a fact deeper than memory, something that his handlers hadn't been able to take away. He felt the ghost of poverty wrap around his ankles and slow his pace whenever he and Steve visited grocery stores or passed classy storefronts on morning walks. He felt it when he thought too long on the grandness of the floor they'd been given in Avengers Tower. Bucky wouldn't expect an impressive grave. Steve had to know that.

No, what worried Steve was more primal- a dead man's eyes seeing something that had never been meant for him. It was a fear the Captain carried at all times. You could smell it on him like cheap perfume.

Bucky nudged the other man's shin under the table, smiling easily over his yogurt. "I can handle a hunk of rock, Rogers. I'm not that fragile."

Steve didn't look convinced. Still- "Run it by your therapist first."

"Is that a yes?"

Steve lowered his gaze to his cereal, soggy now from sitting too long in the milk.

"Get clearance, and we'll see."

* * *

><p>It took three days for Bucky to secure permission, and only because three days separated his and Steve's conversation from the next one-on-one therapy session. The Doctor (an Agent herself, Barnes was sure) had been nosing him towards the door of Avengers Tower for weeks. Her eyes lit like interrogation room lights when he mentioned making the trip.<p>

"That's a wonderful idea. Leaving the city will do you good."

Bucky snorted out a laugh. "It's just over to Brooklyn. Nothing big."

The Doctor tongued her red lips. A bit of the makeup smeared on the tip, and she drew it back into her mouth to suck clean. It was familiar, something she did every couple of minutes each session. How many tubes of lipstick had she eaten over the years?

"I don't think you believe that," she said softly.

"No?"

She shook her head. "I don't think Captain Rogers does, either."

That one, Bucky knew. Steve wouldn't have made him jump through hoops if the man wasn't concerned. As for himself?

"We'll survive, Doc." Barnes threw her an easy smile, sinking further into his chair. "It's just a hole in the ground. Nothing's even in it."

"Nothing physical, maybe."

She didn't say anything more. Instead, she reached for her clipboard and wrote out a note for Steve- clearly stating her permission, in case he wanted more than Bucky's word- leaving Bucky to draw the inevitable conclusion. A conclusion that, if he was honest with himself, he'd been avoiding since the grave first came up in group therapy.

Steve had buried Bucky Barnes. There'd been no body to lock in a pine box, no piece of hair to lace into a mourning locket, but the Captain had done it anyway. He'd laid the remembered life of his friend in the ground and kept living. Bucky wasn't in the grave, but in some ways-

In the first few months he lived with Steve, Bucky spent hours pouring over the old war reels, relearning the history of the body he inhabited. The man who wore his face in them had a laugh like church bells and a smile that left deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He didn't flinch when he was touched from behind or when a friendly hand carded through his hair. He didn't shy from attention; he glowed for the camera and the eyes of his Captain. _That_ was the man Steve had lost. That man and Bucky might still share a face, but the rest was rotting in the earth.

If he was a better friend- if he were more like Dead Bucky than the currently living one- he wouldn't make Steve take him to the grave site. He would tear up the therapist's permission. He would shield Steve from the pain of seeing his dearest friend's ghost haunting a headstone.

The present Bucky did a lot of things to care for Steve, but he was not the dead one. He couldn't give him everything. He couldn't give him this.

He delivered the therapist's note to Steve as soon as the session ended.

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><p>The morning after Bucky's decisive therapy session, Steve was pulled for a week-long mission in Nevada. According to recent intel, a scientist that had been lobotomizing former SHIELD Deep Cover Agents had set up shop there. After a quick promise to plan the trip when he returned, the Captain allowed himself to be dragged off by Tony, Bruce, and Natalia.<p>

If the timing was suspicious, Bucky elected to ignore it.

Ms. Potts kept him entertained in the mean time. They spent most of the week in each other's company: barreling through the Tower's busywork, cooking meals, watching films from Steve's collection, drinking Tony's booze. Though he'd initially been a little apprehensive about stealing drinks, that last proved beneficial. Pepper's usually chatty disposition, Bucky learned, worked double time after a few Whisky Sours. Their third night alone and seven drinks deep each, conversation turned to Cypress Hills.

"Steve thinks you're on a ghost hunt."

The words tripped molasses thick from her tongue. She wasn't slurring, but was dangerously close. She'd probably had enough, but Bucky poured a little more in her glass anyway. He was topping off his own, and it felt rude to drink alone.

"He said that?"

Pepper shrugged, sloshing a bit of whisky onto her pajama pants. "He hinted. He thinks-" She brought the glass to her mouth and sipped. "-that _you_ think you aren't Bucky enough. That you'll get hurt when you go."

Bucky took a deep drink from his glass to ward off the tightening in his throat. "What do you think?"

He and Pepper rarely spent time together- Tony kept her running most days- but they'd made a habit of bonding while the active agents were on missions. Bucky liked her voice, the determined way she jogged through the Tower, the way the left side of her smile turned up more than the right. She was sharp; he valued her input.

Pepper took a large gulp of her whisky, then favored him with a smile. A bit of liquid ran from the high left of it. It made Bucky's chest ache with fondness.

"I think you're exactly who you were meant to be," she said softly, like this were a secret between friends. "And if you want to see a grave, then you should. The reason is nobody's business but yours."

Bucky had spent most of his recent life not knowing what to say. It rarely bothered him when it didn't relate to conversations with Steve; now, however, he felt the failure just as sharply as he did with the Captain.

True to form, Pepper overlooked it. Tossing back the rest of her drink, she stood. "You're going to need help, though. That cemetery has expanded a bit since Steve ordered the burial. I'll handle it in the morning."

Without waiting for a response, she patted Bucky's shoulder and stumbled towards the stairs. Bucky was left staring after her, very much aware of the fact he hadn't flinched from the touch.

As she'd promised, Pepper was hard at work when Bucky woke the next day. By the time he shuffled into their favorite common room, she was already pouring over two copies of cemetery maps, pen firmly between her lips.

With a friendly but firm Skype call, she'd been able to convince the Smithsonian's Collection Manager to send copies of Captain Rogers' correspondences with Cypress Hills Cemetery. An internet search had provided the updated version of the cemetery's layout. After a thorough comparison of the two, she circled a section on the new copy of the map and motioned for Bucky to join her.

"You're definitely in the National Cemetery area," she said, circling the area again to darken the lines. The ink was a soft red, a near perfect match for her hair. Bucky wondered if it was a custom ink. "Near... Restmount two? Between two and three, at least. Sorry I can't be more specific."

Bucky waved off the apology. "Beats having to look through the whole thing."

It wasn't exactly a thanks, but Pepper accepted it. "Buy me dinner sometime, and we'll call it even."

He covered the dinner bills for the remainder of the week.

* * *

><p>"You don't have to go if you don't want to."<p>

It was Saturday morning. The Captain had been back from Nevada for sixteen hours, nine of which he'd spent sleeping. Bucky hadn't slept at all; he didn't want to miss the moment Steve woke up.

"Nnnh-" Steve cracked open an eye. "What, Buck?"

"I know you don't want to. I even understand." Bucky pressed his face deeper into the crook of Steve's shoulder, speaking into his skin. "If you pretend you never paid for that damn headstone, you can pretend you never learned how easy it is to make men into machines."

Steve's jaw clenched against the crown of Bucky's head. Behind his locked lips, a dull grinding started up. "That's not-"

And he sounded so long suffering that Bucky didn't let him finish.

"No," Bucky interrupted, tightening his grip on Steve's chest. "I need to say this."

Steve went quiet, and Bucky loosened the hold of his bruising left hand.

"If you don't see my grave, you can pretend everything that came before DC was a horrible dream. You don't have to think about the reasons why I scream when someone touches me from behind. You don't have to think about how little I sleep." Bucky fisted his metal hand in Steve's shirt, taking care not to tear it. "And maybe you could live like that, but I can't."

"I never said I wanted you to."

Bucky scoffed. "You don't say a lot of things. I still know what you mean."

The grinding behind Steve's lips grew louder; Bucky imagined the Captain was wearing his teeth down to nubs, stealing from himself what time hadn't quite managed to. He waited for Steve to respond, but when only grinding came, he pressed on.

"Sometimes, I think I can taste the rot of my life. My tongue is stained with it. No matter what I eat or drink now, it's always there. I fell, Steve. And you mourned. I can't spend the rest of my life pretending it didn't happen." Bucky sighed into the warm bend of Steve's shoulder. "But I _can_ go alone if you need me to."

Above him, Steve's breath caught in a shudder. The man's arms, which had been fisted into the sheets for the last several minutes, locked around Bucky's waist like a vice.

"You're an idiot." Steve's voice was a hiss, but there was no real bite behind the words.

Bucky didn't ask what he meant, and Steve didn't bother to explain. He simply held him in silence a moment, then slid out from under him and began dressing. He mumbled about traffic, the best route to take to the cemetery, and the map Pepper had apparently mentioned to him the night before.

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><p>It took over an hour to make the drive and locate the grave. When they found it, Bucky sank to his knees in front of it and thought- He didn't know what he thought, really. Or he did, but he thought about far too many irrelevant things.<p>

The softness of the grass under his organic hand, for one thing; this cemetery was clearly well-maintained. The landscaping staff were so committed to the grounds that they'd even saw to the care of this empty pit. It was nothing short of amazing.

He thought about the way the cheap white stone was already cracking, too weak for even a scant seventy years of summer suns and the invisible press of gravity. He thought about the sun-bleached and chipping ink in the gouges of SGT. JAMES BUCHANAN "BUCKY" BARNES.

He thought about how small everything seemed. Even kneeling as he was, the headstone barely reached his belly button. That was fitting, though. Bucky felt small these days; too small for the expansive Tower, too small for Steve's golden hands. This, at least, he was fit for.

Beside him, the grass crunched under the weight of Steve. Bucky glanced over in time to see the Captain cross his legs and scoot in closer to examine the stone.

"You been here before?" Bucky asked. If Steve noticed the crack in his voice, he ignored it.

"Once, when I first woke up." Steve carded a hand through his hair, looking sheepish. "Not one of my better ideas."

Bucky hummed, only half listening. His eyes had landed on an engraving near the base of the stone:

_For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth._

His brows knit as he searched for a memory of those lines. What had they come from? Had they meant anything to him before?

"Like your epitaph?"

He turned to Steve, finding the man had moved even closer while he'd been distracted. Their shoulders were only inches apart, and the Captain's large eyes were fixed on him.

Well, it was pretty, certainly. "What's it from?"

"The Bible. It's Psalm 102:3."

Bucky felt the curious wrinkles between his brows deepen. "Did we go to church?"

"Every week, before the war." The corners of Steve's mouth lifted into a smile. "Had a lot of reason to, I guess. We weren't very Christ-like."

An image came to Bucky then: Steve's small body bloody from yet another fight he'd started, and his own lips wet with booze and the grease of several girl's lipsticks. He felt himself smile.

"No," he said softly, "I don't think we were."

An easy silence fell between them, and Bucky allowed his mind to wander back to the epitaph. _My days are consumed, my bones are burned…_ How long had it taken Steve to choose? Had the Captain imagined Bucky's corpse swallowed by flame on a pyre when he'd finally found it?

"You know," Steve said, pulling Bucky from his thoughts, "I read somewhere that graves are a lot less about the deceased than they are the living. When people choose stones and epitaphs, they do it as personal healing."

Bucky drew his knees to his chest, propping his chin on the bony caps. "What's this say about you then, Cap?"

Steve chewed his lip before answering. "It wasn't just your grave. In a way, I guess, it was mine too."

Not for the first time in his life, Bucky had absolutely no idea what to say to Steve. He stared at the man over the swell of his own kneecaps. "Yea?"

The Captain nodded. "Truth is, I picked that verse for me. You were- Jesus, Buck, I didn't have anyone else." The rim of Steve's eyes glistened with the threat of tears; the man looked up stubbornly to keep them in. "Peggy, yea, and the guys, but none of them… it was just different, I guess. You mattered in ways no one else ever did. And then just like that you were-"

Steve cleared his throat, looking as small as Bucky felt. It made Bucky's heart pound double time, drew the blood from his fingers and legs and made them weak.

"I'm sorry." It was a stupid thing to say, but Bucky had nothing else for him. Steve, because he was Steve, accepted it.

"You got nothing to be sorry for, Buck. I'm… I'm glad you're here. Now. Burying you was one of the worst things I've ever had to do, but I'd do it again if it meant I still got to have you now."

A deep heat was creeping up Bucky's neck, and behind his eyes he could feel pressure building. His own would be as misty as the Captain's if he weren't careful. He inhaled sharply to counteract it.

"Even with my nightmares?"

A sound, more a sigh than a laugh, slipped out of Steve. "Of course."

Bucky nodded, but didn't look over at the Captain. He kept his attention firmly on the engraving at the base of the headstone.

"Sometimes," he whispered, "I wish I could've stayed dead for you." It was the Captain's turn to be speechless. Bucky took advantage of the silence and pressed on. "There's so little left that you remember. I feel… I don't know, that I'm some costume-shop version. I got all the right parts, but the parts aren't what really matter. Can you understand that?"

Steve was silent for a beat longer. In another life, Bucky knew that this would be where the Captain bumped shoulders or knees with him, reassured him physically. But Steve had learned, and no touch came. Only the softness of his voice.

"You know I can't." A sigh like a gale force came from the man. "But that doesn't mean I don't know it's important to you. Whatever you're feeling, you don't have to be ashamed of it. And however you find yourself fitting into the world these days-"

Steve halted, and Bucky finally tore his eyes from the headstone to investigate. The Captain's eyes were wet under furrowed brows, and his mouth was set in a determined line. He was thinking very carefully about what he wanted to say; Bucky wondered if he was testing himself, wondered if Steve thought Bucky was testing him.

"What?" Bucky prompted after a while.

It brought the Captain out of his head. "Please, don't feel like you have to be a dead man. Whoever you are now is fine. Even if we'd went home together after the war, people change. It's nothing."

The pressure behind Bucky's eyes broke, and he felt wetness tease the ends of his lashes. He scrubbed at it stubbornly before brushing his shoulder tentatively against Steve's. The Captain stared at the meeting of their bodies dumbly. Bucky understood. Apart from their time alone in bed, Bucky never initiated contact, especially not in public.

"Thank you," he said, pressing himself a little closer. Steve's answering smile was so bright that Bucky wondered how it didn't scorch him.

Later that afternoon on the ride back to Avengers Tower, Bucky repeated the epitaph to himself and thought about the fire of Steve's honest smiles. He decided the verse wasn't just for the Captain. It was definitely for Bucky, even if the other man hadn't realized at the time. Even if he didn't realize now.

Steve was consuming. Dead or alive, Bucky burned for him.


End file.
